[rustcleaner]

I'd argue the principles Turing and Wolfram lay out in regards to universal computation and computational equivalence are the most foundational, and then various systems or architectures (flow vs stack, etc), etc, are important as there needs to be concrete examples implementing the fundamentals. If you really want to get esoteric, programming goes all the way back with society and religion. Just like how a machine can compute so too can a group of people through their actions, if they adhere as religiously to their tasks as the fablic of reality seems to adhere to its laws in governing the motions of matter. Programming is the building abstract structures which, when represented with matter in the right ways that can take advantage of the moment-by-moment Gets Things Done™ nature of the fabric of reality itself, produces useful transformations of its initial states. Very complex behavior arises from the simplest of mechanistic rulesets, and it's found universally in biology and in places all over reality. Computation is so foundationally fundamental to this place and your (dear reader) existence here, it is shameful it's not in standard middle/high schools' curricula right next to the fundamental theorems of arithmetic and algebra!